Government to investigate Portuguese wife’s death after childbirth in Lagos hospital

On Tuesday, March 28, the news about how a young lady married to a Portuguese man, Chiamaka De Freitas, went viral on the internet on how she died during delivery at the Medical Arts Center (MART).

After, the news hit the internet the medical team at MART immediately released a press statement revealing that, it was not their fault. In their statement, they also revealed how the lady undergone IVF at their hospital, how she missed about 4 weeks of her antenatal and how the baby was born till she gave up on Sunday, March 26, at the hospital.

NAIJ reported that in a new development Chimaka’s husband, Arlindo De Freitas, has reported the case to the Lagos state government, who have promised to begin proper investigation about the death of the 24-year-old makeup artist.

The Director of the Lagos State Office of the Public Defender, Mrs Salami Olubukola, said the state Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Adeniji Kazeem, had directed that the allegation of the victim’s husband, Arlindo that the hospital had a hand in the death of his wife, be duly investigated.

Olubukola disclosed that: “I took her to the hospital on Thursday evening and we did the necessary scans. They said she would have to go through a surgery the following day by 8am. When we got there the following day, I signed the necessary papers and she was taken into the theatre.

The baby was born by 8.37am and everybody was happy. Around 7pm, my wife started bleeding. I noticed that the blood was coming out from different parts of her body, including her private parts. I called the doctors’ attention to it and asked if the bleeding was normal. They said I should not worry that everything was fine. She bled till the following day.

They called me and said they wanted to do a blood test. After two hours, they said her blood pressure was low. They took my wife again into the theatre to see what was wrong. They said they didn’t see anything. They said they needed to do blood transfusion. She continued to bleed until she died on Sunday morning.”

Arlindo, who said his late wife conceived through in vitro fertilisation at the hospital, blamed some of the facility workers whom he said handled the delivery carelessly.

He said: “When she was bleeding, they were injecting her with one pain killer after the other. And at a point, she stopped reacting to it. She bled from 7pm on Friday to 12pm on Saturday, until she lost all her blood. When they were transfusing blood into her, it was passing out from her body until she died. They had been talking about the C-section since she was 20 weeks pregnant.

They said when the pregnancy got to week 37, they would do the operation. Although she was normal, they insisted on a C-section because it is big money in Nigeria. They charged N1.1m for the C-section. With other costs, including accommodation, we were charged N1.4m.”

He said his lawyer would petition the National Assembly over the matter, saying he would follow the case to the end.

However, the hospital, in a statement, said it had no hand in the death of the victim, as they noted that it was saddened by the development because in its four years of existence, Chiamaka’s death was the first mortality recorded at the hospital.

The Director of OPD, Olubukola, said the agency had already contacted Arlindo, adding that investigations were ongoing into the matter.